Mixed Race Studies

2017 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference Call for Papers

University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California
2017-02-24 through 2017-02-26

Explorations in Trans (gender, gressions, migrations, racial) Fifty Years After Loving v. Virginia

Deadline: 2016-04-30
Notification: 2016-07-31
Presenters at the conference must be members. Registration/membership will be available in 2016. Details below.
Subject Fields: We welcome submissions from scholars from all fields, cultural workers, and activists.

The next major Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference will be held February 24-26, 2017, at University of Southern California and will be hosted by the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. The conference will include film screenings and a live performance showcase produced by Mixed Roots Stories.

Download the CMRS 2017 Call For Papers [PDF]

The year 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia, which declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. As a commemoration to Loving’s golden anniversary coupled with the geographic location of California, this conference provides an excellent site to examine critical mixed race issues. With a focus on the root word “Trans” this conference aims to explore interracial encounters relating, but not limited to, transpacific Asian migration, transnational migration from Latin America, transracial adoption, transracial/ethnic identity, interracial marriage from a transregional perspective, the intersections of trans (gendered) and mixed race identity, and mixed race transgressions of race, citizenship, and nation.

The intersections of transmigration/national/regionalism with respect to miscegenation are clear in light of varying marriage proscriptions across geographical regions within the continental United States. California enacted its anti-miscegenation law in 1850, forbidding whites (this category included Mexicans) from marrying blacks, Filipinos, and Asians. Twelve states additionally prohibited intermarriage with Asians, nine prohibited intermarriage with Filipinos, and some prohibited intermarriage with American Indians. Intermarriage with “Hindus” was prohibited in Arizona. Oregon prohibited whites from marrying Native Hawaiians or Kanakas; and Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law forbade intermarriage with anyone of non-Caucasian strain. During Reconstruction, rampant fears of hypersexualized Chinese men marrying white women underscored the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Even following World War II soldiers faced dilemmas as Congress enacted restrictions regarding non-citizen wives entering the U.S that affected the mixed race children of these interracial unions whose occupancy within an interstitial racial space remains a confusing and complex reality in 21st century America. It was not until 1948 that anti-miscegenation laws were abolished in California.

As this conference commemorates the 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia with a focus on “Trans” issues relating to interracial encounters, participants from all fields are invited to present new insights, which will contribute to a broader and deeper understanding in Critical Mixed Race Studies…

For more information, click here. Additional Questions? Contact us at: cmrsmixedrace@gmail.com.

Jews of Color National Convening

Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST)
130 West 30th Street
New York, New York 10001
2016-05-01 Through 2016-05-03

Recent events have moved the struggle for racial justice and inclusion in America to the forefront of public consciousness. Jews of Color occupy a unique space within that struggle, living at the intersection of multiple communities and identities. We come together this spring as Jews and as People of Color to celebrate our diversity and build our strength as a community. We want to build a world in which our Jewishness thrives; a world where we are valued as leaders within the Jewish community; a world where our identities as People of Color are supported by Jewish communities committed to the fight against racism.

The convening will include music and art, content for families and children,, community building, and workshops, trainings and other sessions on building our power to fight for ourselves and our communities.

About the Presenting Sponsors:

This event is presented and sponsored by the Jewish Multiracial Network and Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ) It is co-sponsored by Bend The Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice and supported by The Ford Foundation…

For more information, click here.

Made Black

Jersey City Theater Center
Merseles Studios
339 Newark Avenue, 2nd Floor
Jersey City, New Jersey
Saturday, 2016-05-07 20:00-23:00 EDT (Local Time)

JCTC New Play Reading presents Schwarz Gemacht (Made Black) a cutting-edge, controversial play exploring race and identity through one of the most overlooked subcultures of the 20th century – mixed-race black German citizens during the 1930’s. This uniquely provocative work by Alexander Thomas, is on research and true stories of the people caught between two worlds in one of the most racially conflicted eras in history. Schwarz Gemacht (Made Black) premiered in Berlin at the English Theater of Berlin last year, then at the 2015 New Black Fest at The Lark, receiving a rave Playbill review by Olivia Clement: “Set in 1938 in Berlin, the play is centered on an Afro-German actor and his encounter with an African-American musician and activist that leads to questions about identity and the treatment of people of color both in Germany and in the United States.”

For more information, click here.

“One Drop of Love”: The Keynote Performance for the Mixed Heritage Conference at UCLA

University of California, Los Angeles
James West Alumni Center
325 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, California 90095
Saturday, 2016-04-30 14:30-16:00 PDT (Local Time)

Join us for some or all of this enlightening and affirming conference. One Drop will start at 2:30 pm in the James West Alumni Center.

TICKETS: FREE and open to the public!

We remain so very grateful for your continued support and look forward to sharing One Drop with you.

For more information, click here. To RSVP, click here.

22nd Annual David Noble Lecture featuring Robin D.G. Kelley

Best Buy Theater
Northrop Auditorium
84 Church Street, SE
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
Tuesday, 2016-04-26, 19:00 CDT (Local Time)

Robin D.G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor of History & Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History
University of California, Los Angeles

The 22nd Annual David Noble Lecture will feature Robin D.G. Kelley. His talk is titled “‘A Female Candide’: U.S. Empire, Racial Cartographies, and the Education of Grace Halsell, 1952 – 1986.” Kelley’s talk focuses on Texas-born journalist Grace Halsell, who spent part of the Cold War as a foreign correspondent, including a stint in Vietnam, working as a staff writer under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and engaged in investigations into U.S. “internal colonies.” She chemically darkened her skin and lived as a black woman in Harlem and Mississippi, resulting in her book, Soul Sister; she published Bessie Yellowhair about living as a Navajo and working as a housekeeper; and The Illegals, a book about passing as an undocumented worker from Mexico. In the course of her travels and experiments in racial passing, the worlds she encountered undermined the conceits she grew up with. Halsell’s world view, schooled in Cold War liberalism, Southern paternalism & white supremacy, and domesticity, begins to unravel especially after her stint in Vietnam, and even more so when she turns her attention to the U.S., its ghettos, reservations, borders and finally to Palestine. So in some ways, this is a classic loss of innocence story.

For more information, click here.

Color Lines: Sex, Race, and Body Politics in Pre/Colonial Ghana

Indiana University, Bloomington
Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society
Schuessler Institute for Social Research
1022 E. 3rd Street
Maple Room, IMU
Bloomington, Indiana 47405
Thursday, 2016-04-28, 16:00-17:30 EDT (Local Time)

Carina Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

CRRES Speaker Series, Spring 2016

Drawing on her recently published book about interracial sexual relationships in colonial Ghana and her new research on how indigenous historical actors in this region of West Africa have thought about and constructed blackness as a symbolic, somatic, and political signifier, Ray’s talk explores how race catalyzed social and political change even in areas of Africa without large settler colonial populations. Centering Ghana in her talk Ray argues that race, rather than ethnicity alone, has powerfully shaped the historical landscape of a continent that has for centuries been at the heart of the West’s racializing discourses.

Carina Ray is an associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University. A scholar of race and sexuality; comparative colonialisms and nationalisms; migration and maritime history; and the relationship between race, ethnicity, and political power, Carina’s research is primarily focused on Ghana and its diasporas. She is the author of Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Navigating African Maritime History (with Jeremy Rich) and Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan: A Critical Reader (with Salah Hassan). Her articles have appeared in The American Historical Review, Gender and History, and Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques. Carina is currently working on her new book project, Somatic Blackness: A History of the Body and Race-Making in Ghana.

For more information, click here.

Shade∙ism

London South Bank University
K2-VG10 Keyworth Street
London, SE1 6NG, United Kingdom
Thursday, 2016-04-21 17:30 BST (Local Time)

Join us for this Black History Event organised by EquiNet, a network for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff at LSBU. This event is supported by the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Unit.

This event brings together three speakers who will explore the social impact of gradations in skin tone. Skin colour is a potent signifier of both racial difference and sameness with the desire to have lighter skin evidenced by the increasing use of bleaching products across the globe. Shade∙ism or colourism is experienced intra-racially and is described as discrimination based on (darker) skin tone. The speakers take up the complexity of colourism by exploring skin bleaching and its relationship to shade∙ism. Can the colour complex be dealt with effectively or is it an age-old problem that won’t go away?

Programme

Skin Bleaching: is colourism to blame?
Shirley Tate, Associate Professor in Race and Culture, Leeds University

Shade∙ism: the age old issue that won’t go away
Yvonne Robinson, Senior Research Fellow, Weeks Centre, LSBU

The Colour Complex
Kavyta Raghunandan, Commonwealth Institute

Followed by a reception on the Mezzanine, Keyworth Centre

For more information, click here.

#BlackLivesMatter in Latin America: Race, Space and Consciousness

New York University Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square
New York, New York 10003
Monday, 2016-04-18 18:30-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

The hashtag turned social movement, #blacklivesmatter, has thrust police brutality and institutionalized racism into the American consciousness. African descendants in Latin America are concurrently mobilizing around issues not unlike those faced by blacks in the U.S., drawing inspiration, in part, from #blacklivesmatter. What are the points of convergence in past and present Afro-Latin American and African American struggles to attain human rights? Join us for a multi-media panel discussion on #blacklivesmatter as a globalized from of protest, declaration of black pride and transnational solidarity throughout the Americas.

Moderator:

Dr. Arlene Davila, Professor of Anthropology, Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University

Panelists:

Carmen Perez, The Gathering for Justice
Johanna Fernandez, PhD, CUNY Faculty
Diana Palacios, DRECCA
Wendi Muse, PhD Candidate, NYU

Supported by:

Gallatin Dean’s Office Human Rights Fund
Center for Multicultural Education & Programs
Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Afro-Latin@ Forum

For more information, click here.

Negotiating Identities: Mixed Race Individuals in China, Japan, and Korea

University of San Francisco
McLaren Complex – MC 250
2130 Fulton Street
San Francisco, California 94117-1080
2016-04-14 through 2016-04-15

The University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies is pleased to announce its spring symposium Negotiating Identities: Mixed-Race Individuals in China, Japan, and Korea, a conference to be held at the University of San Francisco on Thursday and Friday, April 14-15, 2016.

The highlight of the conference will be a keynote address by Emma Teng, Professor of History and Asian Civilizations, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

With this conference, the Center plans to provide a forum for academic discussions and the sharing of the latest research on the history and life experiences of mixed-race individuals in China, Japan, and Korea. The conference is designed to promote greater understanding of the cross-cultural encounters that led to the creation of interracial families and encourage research that examines how mixed-race individuals living in East Asia have negotiated their identities…

For more information and to register, click here.

Hybrid Details: Honoring Fred Wah: with Fred Wah, Wo Chan, Mark Nowak and Jeff Derksen

Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
New York, New York 11366
Wednesday, 2016-04-13, 19:00 EDT (Local Time)

Poet Fred Wah is a living legend in Canada, but he remains woefully under-read in this country. To remedy that, we’re celebrating Fred’s oeuvre–a jazzy, radical exploration of place and racial hybridity–and the publication of Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991 (Talonbooks 2016). We’ll have Fred himself, on a rare visit from Canada, and acclaimed poets Wo Chan, Mark Nowak, and Jeff Derksen.

A hapa poet who grew up in his father’s Chinese restaurant, Fred is the winner of the Governor General’s Award (Canada’s highest literary award), served as the country’s fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureate, and was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2013. He has been compared to the American experimental poets–like the Language Poets and Objectivists Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, with whom he studied–but Fred’s work is informed by his identity growing up in a Chinese-Irish-Scots and Swedish household and his relationship to the countryside of British Columbia. A self-described “Kootenay boy,” Wah has said, “My writing has been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the local, the landscape of the Kootenays in southeastern BC; it mountains, lakes, and forests.” The editor of several important Canadian literary journals (TISH, Open Letter, West Coast Line), Fred is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Waiting For Saskatchewan (Turnstone 1985) (this Governor’s General award-winner explores Saskatchewan, “a place that held, for me,” Fred states, “the complications of a mixed-race family history and the geographical site for an Asian-European intersection”) and Diamond Grill (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1996), a coming-of-age collection based on childhood memories working at his father’s Chinese restaurant. Scree collects almost a half century of work, ranging from visual poetry and jazzy riffs to Black Mountain-style open poems about the Canadian landscape to new narrative prose poems and Haibun. As the poet Rob McLennan writes, “The dialogue between Fred Wah’s earlier works tests the possibilities of a poetics of place, of a syntactic dynamism opened by the North American postwar experiments in form and a push against the Western box of knowledge (a push that is threaded through 1960s counterculture up to the globalization of the early 1990s).”

Three award-winning poets will read and comment on Fred’s poems: Wo Chan and Mark Nowak. A queer Fujianese poet and drag performer, Wo Chan was a 2015 AAWW Margins Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from Poets House, Kundiman, and Lambda Literary; read Wo’s poems Such as and Chopped in The Margins. Guggenheim Fellow and former labor organizer Mark Nowak is the author of Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press 2004, afterword by Amiri Baraka), named a The New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” and the acclaimed book on coal mining disasters in the US and China, Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press 2009), which Howard Zinn called “a stunning educational tool.”

Moderated by Simon Fraser University Professors Jeff Derksen. A poet and theorist at the nexus of geography, cultural production, and globalization, Jeff co-founded Vancouver’s writer-run centre, the Kootenay School of Writing. He has written several books including The Vestiges (2013), Transnational Muscle Cars (2010) and Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics (2010), all from Talonbooks.

Co-sponsored by the Manhattanville MFA program

For more information, click here.